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Punch, Hot
In order to make good punch, it is necessary that the sherbet-or mixture of sugar, flavouring, acid juice, and water-should be both rich and delicate, and that the ingredients should be thoroughly blended. When the latter point is attained, the spirits and wine can be added, in proportions to suit the taste. The following recipe is a general favourite. Rub the rind of a large fresh lemon with two or three lumps of sugar till all the yellow part has been taken off; then add more sugar to make up the weight to four ounces. Put this into the punch-bowl, and strain over it the juice of the lemon. Pour then into the punch-bowl a pint of boiling water, and stir the mixture well for five or six minutes. Add a quarter of a pint of rum, the third of a pint of brandy, and stir again. Half a nutmeg, grated, may be added or not. Time to prepare, a few minutes. Sufficient for a quart of punch.
A classic five-part punch built on an oleo-saccharum. The recipe is sound as written; only the units and one piece of technique need translating.
- The hinge: rub, don't zestRubbing sugar lumps against the lemon rind draws out the peel oil into the sugar, which is what gives the punch its perfume. Grated zest or a peeler will not extract the same quantity of oil, and bottled juice contributes nothing aromatic. Use an unwaxed lemon and keep rubbing until the lumps are stained yellow and the fruit looks pale.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, not 16. A pint of boiling water is a shade under 2 1/2 US cups (about 570 ml), a quarter-pint of rum is 5 fl oz, and a third of a pint of brandy is a fraction under 7 fl oz. The 'quart' of the yield line is an imperial quart, 40 fl oz, though the measured liquids in fact come to only about 32.
- Four ounces of sugarThat is a weight, not a volume: about 115 g, a scant 2/3 cup of granulated sugar, or upwards of two dozen modern sugar cubes (Victorian lumps were larger). Lump sugar is specified because the hard cube gives you something to abrade the rind with; loose granulated sugar cannot do that job.
- Dissolve fully before the spirits go inThe five or six minutes of stirring is not padding. Sugar that has not dissolved in the hot water will never dissolve properly once the alcohol is in, and the punch turns out thin at the top and syrupy at the bottom.
- Heat and alcoholAdd the rum and brandy off the heat, as written, and serve promptly. Holding hot punch over a flame drives off the spirit and the lemon oil, leaving a flat, stewed drink. If it must be kept warm, a bowl set over hot water is better than a burner.
- Strength and yieldAbout 12 fl oz of spirits. Measured against the recipe's stated quart (40 fl oz) that is around 12 percent alcohol by volume; measured against the roughly 32 fl oz the ingredients actually make, nearer 15 percent. Either way it sits in the range of wine, but drunk warm and quickly. It will fill perhaps six small punch cups.
- Rum and brandyA dark, full-flavoured rum and a plain grape brandy suit the balance the recipe assumes; a light white rum disappears entirely. Cognac is not required, and a decent inexpensive brandy is plausibly closer to what an ordinary Victorian household kept.
- The nutmegGrate it over the surface of the bowl at the last moment rather than stirring it through. Half a whole nutmeg is a lot for a quart; a light grating is enough unless you want the drink to taste distinctly of it.
The word punch is generally traced to the Hindi panch, five, for the five components -- spirit, sugar, lemon, water and spice -- and the drink is usually said to have reached England with East India Company sailors and merchants in the seventeenth century. By the time Cassell's was compiled, punch had settled into a fixture of English domestic hospitality: the punch-bowl was a piece of household plate, and hot punch was the winter counterpart to cold cups and claret cups served in summer. The entry's insistence on the sherbet -- the sugar, acid, flavouring and water blended first -- reflects the older Arabic-derived term sharbat for a sweetened fruit drink, and preserves the essential structural point that a punch is a finished non-alcoholic base to which spirits are added, not a pile of ingredients thrown together in a bowl.